Camping

Over Labor Day weekend Yummy and her friends (and their friends) took me camping with them in Catoctin Mountain Park. It's about half way across Maryland and just south of the Pennsylvania border. This would be the same park that houses Camp David. Obama is said to have been spending the weekend there, but I didn't see half of the President related air traffic that I see around DC.

Their definition of camping and mine differed a bit. I've grown accustomed to digging a latrine, chopping and lashing together a toilet, sterilizing water, etc. I feel I was able to adapt well to their pro-bathroom and well water philosophy.

I introduced a few things to their camping repertoire, too.

Yummy planned chili for our first night. It was her recipe, her ingredients, and my stew pot. Luckily it's easy to get guys to take over the cooking so long as there's that danger element involved (i.e. fire). It turned out really well. I would take it over the stuff from Ben's Chili Bowl any day. What was even better was that it could have doubled as sloppy joe filling.

We brought along two pie irons [link]. They're two concave metal squares with long handles coming off of them. You butter the concave side, put in bread, add pie filling (or whatever), close it up and jam it in the fire until it's charred and you have to do another one. After 4 or 5 you should figure out how long to leave it in.

One of the other camper supplemented my pie irons with a doodad from Pampered Chef that allowed us to do much the same thing, but the slices of bread were crimped together and the crusts removed before it was put in the pie iron. That, combined with practice over the fire, did a great job making pies.

We brought along a cast iron griddle, too. It was flat on one side and grooved on the other. So we could make pancakes, eggs, bacon, etc. on one side, and flip it over to make steak.

Yes, I seasoned it before we left. Just slathered it in Crisco and left it in the oven at 300°F for an hour. Keep away from soap, clean by wiping it down.

We also brought along a camp percolator. It says it makes 9 cups, but in reality it was 5 half cups. The first use involved everyone sitting around the fire wondering if we needed to lower the grill, build the fire, sacrifice that screaming child a few sites over, or just wait. We built up the fire (when guys are involved that's always the answer) until it started boiling over. It worked great, but we should have gotten a larger pot.

I introduced them to hobo dinners, too. This is where you lay out some aluminum foil, make a hamburger patty and put it on the foil, add carrots, potatoes, onions, whatever you want around the patty, close the foil so ash can't get in and juice can't get out, then toss it in the hot coals of your fire. Burying it coals is optional. After 15-20 minutes you dig it out with a shovel, open it up, and eat. I've hear about similar tricks used to cook on a car engine during road trips.

Alas, not everything we tried was a success. I tried to make ice cream in coffee cans. You put the ingredients in a small coffee can, put on the lid, duct tape it down, put it in the larger can, fill the gap with ice and salt, duct tape that lid on, and roll it around for 30 minutes. I got frost to form on the outside of the can, but inside we only got sweet, frothy milk. I'll have to work on this and try it again next year.

Oh, and the birdies got to come, too. Gandolf was willing, if not eager, to share Bixby's cage for the car ride and stay in there at night. Like a fool, I left the carefully packed bird food at home. Bixby is willing to eat everything and anything. She felt obliged to notch every piece of bread for grilled cheese. Gandolf is more picky. We had to go shopping to get her crackers, Skittles, a seed log, egg noodles, and a bag of bird food. She ate the crackers, the Skittles, the egg noodles, and any chips that were offered to her. She was hungry enough that she tried to steal a bagel from the camp 3 year old on the last morning. Two and a half crackers fixed that.

Yummy came with a new two person tent and an air mattress that fills the tent perfectly. The mattress has an electric pump that had it up and useful in no time. I definitely prefer it to blowing up the mattress myself, but it does seem like a bit of a cheat.